According to Langlands, pure motives are related to a certain class of automorphic representations.

Can one see mixed motives in the automorphic set-up? For examples, can one see periods of mixed motives in entirely automorphic terms? The goal of this and the next lecture is to supply some examples.

We define motivic correlators describing the structure of the motivic fundamental group $\pi_1^{\mathcal M}(X)$ of a curve. Their relevance to the questions raised above is explained by the following examples.

We consider the coherent cohomology of toroidal compactifications of Shimura varieties with coefficients in the canonical extensions of automorphic vector bundles and show that they can be computed as relative Lie algebra cohomology of automorphic representations. Consequently, any Galois representation attached to these coherent cohomology should be automorphic. Our proof is based on Franke’s work on singular cohomology of locally symmteric spaces and via Faltings’ B-G-G spectral sequence we’ve also strengthened Franke’s result in the Shimura variety case.